As one who enters contests with some regularity, I am always curious to understand what makes for a $1000 poem, or even a $10,000 poem. Well, here’s an answer to the question of what makes a $141,000 poem. A work of verse written by a teenage Charlotte Bronte, “I’ve Been Wandering in the Greenwoods,” fetched that much at auction recently. The thing is written in pencil on a 3-inch square piece of paper, so it’s really a miniature replica of a poem. The story would have been better, of course, had it been discovered in a dusty attic, between the pages of a dusty old book.
The tiny and expensive extant ms. of Charlotte Bronte’s “I’ve Been Wandering in the Greenwoods”
Here’s the poem:
I’ve been wandering in the greenwoods
by Charlotte Brontë
I’ve been wandering in the greenwoods
And mid flowery smiling plains
I’ve been listening to the dark floods
To the thrushes thrilling strains
I have gathered the pale primrose
And the purple violet sweet
I’ve been where the Asphodel grows
And where lives the red deer fleet.
I’ve been to the distant mountain,
To the silver singing rill
By the crystal murmering fountain,
And the shady verdant hill.
I’ve been where the poplar is springing
From the fair Inamelled ground
Where the nightingale is singing
With a solemn plaintive sound.
Speaking of miniature replicas, this just in from Japan: you can now get 1/12 scale miniature bathroom fixtures for your action figures.
Speaking of that, and of making much out of the necessary, the ancient Egyptians venerated the scarab beetle because they saw their young as-if-by-magic emerge from neatly rolled balls dung. Anything that does that must be holy. Here’s another installment of Ze Frank’s True Facts series.